Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus and a control method therefor.
Description of the Related Art
With the recent advent of moving image sharing sites where moving images that have been shot are shared over the Internet, users are increasingly wanting to shoot creative and interesting moving images. However, for a typical user who is unaccustomed to shooting moving images, shooting such creative and interesting moving images is not easy. Furthermore, editing tasks such as adding special effects to moving images, joining moving images together, and so on are complicated for such typical users, and thus pose problems when creating interesting moving images.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-218384 is known as a technique that makes it easier to join moving images together. According to a digital camera disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-218384, when a continuous recording mode is set using a mode setting dial, a moving image that has been shot is additionally recorded in an existing file in which another moving image is recorded.
Meanwhile, functions that enable users to shoot moving images with added special effects through simple operations are also being proposed, primarily as smartphone apps. For example, a function for adding special color/tone conversion filtering effects to moving images, a function for shooting moving images of a predetermined short length multiple times and then automatically joining the moving images together, and so on have been proposed.
In addition, a technique that varies the playback speed of a moving image by recording the moving image while adjusting the framerate of the moving image based on an acceleration in a camera apparatus when shooting the moving image has also been proposed (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-262135).
When a plurality of moving images that have been joined together are played back consecutively, any special effects that have been added to the respective moving images will be noticed by a user in succession. The relationship between special effects from moving image to moving image can also be considered to affect how interesting the resulting moving image is, but the conventional techniques do not take this into consideration. Meanwhile, when multiple types of special effects are available, determining the special effect suited to each moving image individually and applying those special effects based on the results of the determinations increases processing loads.
With respect to techniques for varying the playback speed of a moving image, the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-262135 merely takes the acceleration of a camera apparatus into consideration, and does not consider a motion of a subject, the type of a primary subject among such subjects, or the like.